Friday, November 30, 2012

Day 6 -- HR roundtable discussion on workplace sexual harassment

We held a roundtable discussion earlier
today with HR executives from few companies in the IT/ITES sector to
share their practices on the management of workplace sexual harassment. The roundtable included Ms. Sheila
Jayaprakash, a senior advocate in the Madras High Court.

The roundtable kicked off with
introductions of the organizers – Prajnya,
FLEXI Careers India, Empowering Women in IT (eWIT).
4 companies gave brief presentations about the policies they had on
workplace sexual harassment. Ms. Jayaprakash then gave a broad
overview of the Vishaka guidelines and then gave her comments and
observations. Here are some of them:

When the company has a fixed
committee, it would be a standing committee; it need not be all from
the company and might include a NGO member. But if all of them can't
come, a subset, inquiry committee might go out and have a hearing,
but it would have to have the chairman and the NGO member.

The committee must draw from
across departments, including the shop floor, and not be overloaded
with HR people.

Wherever the complaint comes from,
members from that department must recuse themselves

The names of those in the committee cannot be anonymous and must be fully displayed. If the
company has a system where employees can send their complaint to a
email ID, the employee should be able to know who is part of that
group email ID.

A standing committee does not
screen complaints

Complaints cannot be anonymous;
they must be registered. The accused must be notified and given time
to give a written response to the allegations.

Terms of reference must be
specific to the incident and the committee should not discuss
irrelevant details

Parties should be asked if they
want a lawyer – in the case of wrongful termination suits,
ex-employees usually note in their case that the company denied them
legal counsel.

Parties can bring witness to the
hearing; the committee does not investigate.

Ms Jayaprakash said, “your policy does not
instill confidence, its how you handle it.”

This was followed by a Q&A session.
One of the concerns was privacy/security issues with having an
outsider in the committee. Ms Jayaprakash noted that these hearings are not
about corporate secrets, its about relationships.